A Closer Look at Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation
The Invitation inhabits this space of obscured certainty, of seeing just enough to dread the worst, using it to explore the anxieties of changing times and growing apart from friends you've once known.
There’s something unsettling to dinner parties, at least in the last eight months. Small indoor gatherings have been found to be spreading COVID-19, and the CDC urges people to take caution through the holidays. I don’t know the next time I’ll be sharing dinner with friends. Right now, it feels so claustrophobic, an unnecessary risk.
Karyn Kusama’s 2015 film The Invitation assumes a deeper dread when I watch it in light of 2020. The film is about a group of friends reuniting for a dinner party at Eden’s house. Nobody has been there in the two years since the accidental death of Eden and Will’s son. Eden and Will subsequently divorced, and everyone has catching up to do.
The night starts with a dead coyote. Will’s bringing his new girlfriend, Kira, to meet his friends. On the drive, Will hits a coyote and mercy-bludgeons it, carrying it off the road. We’re trapped inside the car with Kira, unsure what exactly is happening beyond the windshield, unable to see what’s going on, but understanding the nature of the horror.
The Invitation inhabits this space of obscured certainty, of seeing just enough to dread the worst, using it to explore the anxieties of changing times and growing apart from friends you've once known. The film’s a slow burn, examining the gnawing uncertainty of what’s going on in the lives of people once close to us.
This gathering feels familiar to me. Every year since graduating college, my friends and I have reunited on New Year’s Eve, whether in Boston or Portland, Maine. In our first year, this was somewhat of a (literal) pig pile in a Cambridge Airbnb. More recently, we cook dinner. We bring new significant others, new friends, and talk about grad school, new jobs, furniture. How long until the discussion evolves again into spouses and promotions?
Kusama’s film, though, is haunted by deeper questions. The trauma of Will and Eden’s deceased son ripples through the house. In the time that’s passed, Eden and her second husband David have found a new spiritual group in Mexico called the Invitation. During their time there, they met Pruitt and Sadie, new friends who crash the dinner party. Nobody really wants Pruitt or Sadie there, but they’re trying to be gracious about it. The group dynamic has changed, and everyone is also trying to figure out the nature of the Invitation. The film asks whether Will is imagining something afoot, or could there be something in the Kool-Aid? Is the Invitation just a cult?
The house is dark and modern: wooden cabinets, free-floating stairs, glass coffee tables. Eden’s an ethereal presence in a floor-length white dress. Will notices how different she looks. Eden says that she is different, that all the useless pain is gone, yet there’s something gauzy to her free spirit. Quickly, Will begins to see through the veneer.
The film conveys agitation through its close attention to tropes––poor cell service, home invasions in the neighborhood—and a script that animates our uncertainty, yet undercuts it as other party guests ask what Will is so worried about. This won’t just be a cult movie, right?
The characters call out our fears. Will goes to the bathroom, remembering a night in the tub with Eden, their son coming in before bedtime. He’s called out of flashback by Gina’s scream in the other room. At once, her scream acknowledges what we’re expecting—something is about to go wrong—and shrugs it off as she yelps that they’re in a cult, while other friends speculate that the evening is going to become a recruitment event akin to Mary Kay.
Resting at the heart of the movie, alongside the resonant trauma of their deceased son, is this question about cults: Are Eden, David, Pruitt, and Sadie part of something unsavory, or is this New Age spirituality just left of normal?
While this cult anxiety, this fear that there might actually be plots against us, is usually a mind game appealing to some macabre part of me—and it does exist at the emotional core of the film—what surfaces for me now is the trepidation surrounding the reunion. In the passing years, in the time we lose touch, what if our friends join a cult, marry the wrong person, fall into an MLM?
This year might be the first my friends do not convene for New Year’s Eve. We will not cram into one apartment, exchanging gifts, cooking currywurst, and watching the ball drop at midnight like we did a year ago, standing before a new decade and wondering what 2020, what the remainder of our twenties, might hold. Such is the holiday season ahead of us.
In the film, Dr. Joseph leads his followers through a hope for transcendence after trauma. He recognizes past pain and has something to offer to those who’ve ascribed to his beliefs. The Invitation isn’t just asking, what if our friends are in a cult, but also: where might they put all of their pain?
Kusama’s film witnesses Eden and Will’s pain, but it does not excuse the violence at the cult’s core. Through the pain we might find a new beginning, but it is still one that might take us to task. Because in the end, that’s it, an invitation. To what extent will we bring it in?
